“There’s no use you calling me that,” she said in a clear, dry tone, and went into her room and shut the door.
Who can I call that? he thought, standing there. He felt as if something was being taken from him, out of his body; he pressed his arms against his ribs to protect himself. There isn’t anybody that there’s any use calling father, he thought, and now there isn’t anybody that there’s any use calling mother. What a joke, I was born without parents. There isn’t any use; she’s right. And all that other stuff, the evening land, the town, Allia, that isn’t real either. Kid stuff. But I’m not a kid. Kids have a father and a mother. I’m not, I don’t. I haven’t got anything and I’m not anything. He stood there in the hall knowing this to be the truth. It was at this time that he remembered, physically, with his body not his mind, the touch of Donna’s hand on his arm, the color of her nail polish, the sound of her voice: “Don’t let anything happen to you, Buck.” He turned away from his mother’s door then, went back into the kitchen and his own room to get ready what he would need tomorrow morning: the clothes he would wear, and a packet of bread, salami, and fruit for the long walk to the mountain.
He was awake at three, and again at four. He would have got up and gone, but there was no use starting early, since he had told the girl to meet him at the gate at six. He turned over and tried to sleep. The twilight of daybreak in the room, a shadowless dim clarity, was like the light of the other land. His alarm clock ticked by the head of the bed. He gazed at the whitish face, the hands both drawing downward. There were no clocks, there. There were no hours. It was not the river of time flowing that moved the clock’s hands forward; their mechanism moved them. Seeing them move men said, Time is passing, passing, but they were fooled by the clocks they made. It is we who pass through time, Hugh thought. We walk. We follow beside the streams, the rivers; sometimes we may cross the stream…He lay half-dreaming until five. As the silenced alarm clicked he stood up, feeling the floor cool on the soles of his feet. Within two minutes he was dressed and out of the house.
He was at the gateway before six. The girl was there waiting.
He was still not sure what her name was. When the people of the twilight said it, it sounded like Rayna or Dana; she had corrected him when he said Rayna, but he had not understood the correction. “The girl,” he called her when he thought of her, and the word had about it a color of darkness and anger and the sound of the creek running. There she was standing near the blackberry thicket in the bluish, dusty, warm light of early morning under the thin-foliaged trees of the gateway woods. She looked up when she heard him coming. Her sallow face did not soften, but she held out her hand, palm up, purple-stained, offering him blackberries. “They’re getting ripe,” she said, and dumped them into his hand. They were small and sweet with the long heat of August.
“Did you try the gate?” he asked.
She picked a few more berries and joined him on the path, offering them to him. “It was shut.” She went a little ahead and looked down the tunnel-like drop of the path among the bushes.
“It’s there now.”
“In again Finnegan, that’s me,” Hugh said, following. “Here goes.” But he stopped on the threshold between the lands and turned, as he had never done before, to look back at the daylight: the dusty leaves, the sun-washed blue between the leaves, the flutter of a small brown bird from one branch to another. Then he turned and followed the girl into the dusk.
After he had knelt for his ceremonial first drink of the water of the creek, he saw that the girl had done the same thing. She was kneeling on the shelf-rock looking down at the running water, in no conventional posture of prayer or worship; but he knew from the hold and poise of her body that that water was, to her as it was to him, holy. She looked round presently, and stood up. They crossed the creek and went on into the evening land together. She went ahead, silent. The forest was entirely silent, once they had lost the voice of the water. No wind stirred the leaves.
After the broken, wakeful night Hugh felt thickheaded, content to walk forward through the forest wordlessly, mindlessly, following the steady pace the girl set. All thought and all emotion was in abeyance. He walked. He felt again that he could go on like this, striding easily under still trees, the cool air of the forest on his face, endlessly. He abandoned himself to the image without fear. When he had gone past the gateway, when he had lost himself, he had been terrified by that idea that he could go on and on and on under the trees in the twilight and there would never be any change or end; but now, following the axis, going the right way, he was entirely at peace. And he saw Allia at the end of the endless journey, like a star.
The girl had stopped and was waiting for him in the path, short solid figure, jeans and blue checked shirt, round grim face. “I’m hungry, you want to stop and eat?”
“Is it time?” he said vaguely.
“We’re nearly to Third River.”
“O.K.”
“Did you bring anything?”
He could not get his mind in focus. Only after she had chosen a place to sit, near the path, beside a tributary stream-let that had been running parallel to their road, did he react to her question and offer to share his bread and meat. She had brought hard rolls, cheese, hardboiled eggs, and a sack of little tomatoes, rather squashed in transit but tempting in their bright innocent red, in this dim place where all colors were muted and no flower bloomed. He put his supplies beside hers; after he took a tomato from her side, she took a slice of salami from his; after which they shared freely. He ate a great deal more than she did, finding himself very hungry, but as he ate it faster they came out more or less even.
“Does the town on the mountain have a name?” he asked, feeling awake at last but much relaxed, and starting on the last piece of bread and salami.
She said a couple of words or a long word in the language of the land. “It just means Mountain Town. That’s what I call it when I think in English.”
“I guess I did too. What do you…You called the place something, once. The whole place.” He gestured with his sandwich at all the trees, all the twilight, the rivers behind and ahead.
“I call it the ain country.” Her eyes flashed at him, distrustful and defiant.
“Is that from their language?”
“No.” Presently she said, unwilling, “It’s from a song.”
“What song?”
“There was this folk singer in assembly in school once and he sang it, it got stuck in my head. I couldn’t even understand half of it, it’s in Scotch or something. I don’t even know what ‘ain’ means, I guess I thought it means ‘own,’ my own country.” Her voice was savage with self-consciousness.
“Sing it,” Hugh said very low.
“I don’t know half the words,” she said, and then, looking away from him and with her head bent down, she sang,
Her voice was like a child’s, like a bird’s voice, sudden, clear, and sweet. The voice and the craving tune made the hair stand up on Hugh’s head, made his eyes blur and a tremor of terror or delight shake his body. The girl had looked up at him, staring with eyes gone dark. He saw that he had reached out his hand towards her to stop her singing, and yet he did not want her to stop, he had never heard a song so sweet.
“It wasn’t—it isn’t right to sing here,” she said in a whisper. She looked around, then back at him. “I never did before. I never thought. I used to dance. But I never sang—I knew—”
“It’s all right,” Hugh said, meaninglessly. “It’ll be all right.”
They were both motionless, listening to the tiny murmur of the stream and the immense silence of the forest, listening as if for a reply.